The Retired
Assassin’s Guide to Orchid Hunting
Assassin. Gardener. Reluctant cat adoptee.
All Dante wants is to be
left alone in the small New Zealand town no one’s heard of. No
drama. No bodies. No questions. But then, of course, the orchid convention
comes to town, and Dante is knee deep in suspects, intrigue, and red herrings.
On top of all this, Dante
must navigate a mysterious woman from his past, cat issues, and the terrifying
prospect of a first date. And he has to do it while fighting his instinct to
solve problems the old-fashioned way: permanently.
The ‘Retired Assassin’s Guide to Orchid Hunting’ is a cosy
paranormal mystery with found family, ghosts, a grumpy assassin and a sunshine
gardener.
Come for the murder, stay
for the cat, the gardens, and the New Zealand country charm.
Purchase Links
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DWVD5XRM
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0DWVD5XRM
EXCERPT:
In which the straight way is lost.
Dante walked around the
waterfront, his stomach churning uneasily. His next step was unclear.
An MI6 agent had come here,
to his turf, and they hadn’t made formal contact. The only reason for this was
that they planned to kill him.
Worse yet, Charlie was with
Stephanie. That complicated things immensely. The last thing he wanted was a
hostage situation.
This required careful
handling. Dante wondered who he’d managed to annoy enough to want him dead.
On his wrist, his watch
alarm made a small buzz against his skin. Dante smiled, a curl of his lip that
contained no humour whatsoever. Sometimes it wasn’t nice to be proven right.
* * *
In his back garden, Dante
waited in the deep shadows under the weeping willow. Someone had deactivated
his alarm - the obvious, consumer-grade one that he’d installed as a first
defence. That had tripped the silent alarm his watch monitored.
The second security system
was working perfectly well, and showed Dante that right now, someone was
stealthily and methodically searching the wall at the back of his sitting room.
His weapons stash was
hidden there behind a false panel. It looked like the searcher was using an
infrared flashlight with goggles — a nice piece of kit that Dante almost
preferred to self-contained infrared.
He ran over his options. He
could trip the alarm himself and set off an ear-splitting siren. The searcher
would flee, most likely out the back and right past Dante’s hiding place.
He could call the police,
who would arrive, sirens blaring, with much the same outcome.
Or, he could enter his
house in absolute silence and confront the searcher himself. The hairs on the
back of his neck rose as this option swam clearer in his mind, like a shark
circling closer through murky waters.
On this path, death
awaited. If not his, then certainly the intruder’s.
It felt as inevitable as
the pull of the tide. Dante was not a gardener who used to be an assassin. He
was an assassin pretending to be a gardener.
Waiting in the darkest
shadows in the dead hour of the night, it was harder and harder to deny this
fact.
He tried to remember the AA
motto, but it slipped from his mind. Instead, another phrase entered his
thoughts. It had been spoken to him, quite recently, by a man who was now dead.
“I found myself in a dark
wood, for the straight way was lost.”
Without consciously
choosing to, Dante glided out of the shadows, his Glock fitting perfectly into
the palm of his hand. The back door lock clicked open as his fingerprint
touched the sensor.
It was the witching hour of
midnight as death entered the house.
Author Bio – Naomi is a writer living in New Zealand. When not busy writing or raising
her twin son and daughter, she spends her free time (ha!) surfing, kitesurfing,
and retrieving her shoes from Max the dog.
Social Media Links –
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16314712.Naomi_Kuttner
https://www.facebook.com/NaomiKuttnerAuthor/
https://naomikuttner.com/
https://www.instagram.com/naomikuttner/
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